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American Pastoral

Plan B has a way of sneaking up on people. A little more than two years ago, Tim and Liz Young were living on the seventh hole of a golf course outside Atlanta. Tim, who is 47, was an entrepreneur, creating marketing-service companies that he’d sell to companies like Cisco and SAP — “boring stuff that you can’t explain to your mom or a kid what you do,” he said. Liz, who is 31, had taught special ed. After he took her horseback riding on a dude ranch for her birthday, he told her he could imagine living someplace like that. “Really?” Liz wondered. “We thought we’d just have land for ourselves, maybe horses,” she recalled recently.

They traded the fairway view for Nature’s Harmony Farm in Elberton, Ga., 76 acres of rolling fields and woods that had become overgrown with weeds. Once they started reading about how to restore the land without using the pesticides recommended by their county extension agent, they learned that they needed to create an entire ecosystem. Before they could get any horses, they’d have to employ cows, chickens, sheep and pigs. “Between the manure they deposit and what they graze, the land comes back to great health,” Tim explained. Soon they were reading about the effects of the industrial food system. “Once our eyes were opened, we said, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ ” Liz said. “Not just for ourselves, but for anyone in our local community.” Tim swapped what he calls his business hat for a straw cowboy hat, but he couldn’t dislodge it entirely. Before they knew it, the Youngs were selling meat.

The Youngs know that most people will choose to buy the cheapest meat at Wal-Mart, but they were determined to preserve rare breeds. As they walked the farm on a February afternoon, they were alternately surrounded by Ossabaw and Berkshire hogs rooting through the woods (the endangered Ossabaw descended from Iberian pigs abandoned by Spanish settlers on a Georgia island 400 years ago); noisy heritage-breed turkeys perched on a log; movable pens of sheep and docile Murray Grey cattle (one of two breeds recognized as Kobe beef in Japan); and chickens that emerged from retrofitted cotton trailers — spray-painted “Freebird 1” and “Freebird 2” — to peck at the ground.

Photo

Liz and Tim Young and the rest of the ecosystem on Natures Harmony Farm.Credit
David La Spina for The New York Times

Before the farm’s animals could get to market 35 miles away in Athens, the couple faced a daunting learning curve. “I think a lot of people who do what we do start with Joel Salatin,” Tim said of the “beyond organic” farming hero. They read Salatin’s books and visited his Virginia farm, as well as other sustainable models in the Southeast. But nothing could prepare the Youngs for the realities of full-time farming — like finding 25 dead piglets that had been abandoned by their mothers.

Their decision to raise animals without the use of antibiotics or medication means that some get sick and die. “You have to have values to get through those kinds of days and those kinds of conditions,” Tim said, “to say: ‘I’m sorry that that animal died, probably because we didn’t feed her any worming medication. But she shouldn’t be here.’ And that’s a really harsh thing to say. But you really set out of a love of the land, not a lack of love for the animals.”

The couple’s beyond-organic values also negate most shortcuts. Their only help comes from an apprentice, who lives with them for a year to learn about farming; they grind the animals’ feed from local grain; they hand-clean 300 eggs a day; and they’re developing enough breeding stock so that all animals will be born on the farm. It also means they had to learn how to kill, clean and package 200 chickens a week in the open-air, U.S.D.A.-inspected facility they built.

Like other 21st-century farms, Nature’s Harmony has a blog, where the Youngs share their unvarnished story. “A lot of people kind of want to live vicariously through us,” Liz said. “Because they’d love to be doing something like moving away from the city, enjoying nature.” Their newsletter has thousands of subscribers, and they now organize monthly tours for armchair agrarians. (“Let’s face it,” Tim said. “If anybody reads ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ or ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,’ they find us.”) The Youngs encourage their visitors to do what they’re doing: “We’ll never be able to meet the demand,” Tim said with a sigh.

The Youngs are honest about their lifestyle changes: gone are travel and nice clothes. They’ve become addicts of “American Idol,” which they watch in the home theater in the large house they have built. “We didn’t come out here to be poor hippies and we’re on the farm and we’re in the tent,” Tim explained. “We said, ‘We’re going to be here our whole life, we’re going to work hard and we need a nice place to come in to.’ ”

Nature’s Harmony will never make the Youngs wealthy again, but they seem past caring. “A lot of what I’ve done in my business life, I don’t think it really means anything,” Tim said. “There’s this whole — you’re seeing a lot of it now with all the politics and bailouts — way to make money in the world but not really do anything to contribute. I feel like what we do is important. But it’s not financially rewarding. Who cares? As long as you can make it on your own.” He tugged on his weathered hat and added, “Let me tell you something: we’re going to eat well.”

And others are, too. Their meat is sold to 50 monthly subscribers, as well as at the weekly virtual and actual farmers’ markets in Athens. Some of their Poulet Rouge chickens, known for their firmer flesh and genuine flavor, are allotted to Five & Ten Restaurant there. The chef, Hugh Acheson, who grew up in kitchens “where things came in with feathers and heads,” says the chickens, which are killed at 84 rather than 40 days, “taste like they should. The normalization of the world made us forget how they taste,” he said. “You eat something like that, you realize that things could be so much better.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM43 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: American Pastoral. Today's Paper|Subscribe